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Why Did Adobe Buy Macromedia?
option8 writes "According to John Dvorak the reasoning behind Adobe's recent (and to many, surprising) purchase of Macromedia for $3.4 billion is that Adobe was afraid Microsoft was going to do it first. An interesting look at the thinking and attitude of Adobe from someone who's been following them for a long time. From TFA: "So, mostly out of fear, Adobe buys its main competitor and now must shoehorn the company into its unfortunate not-invented-here corporate culture. (This aspect of Adobe is another story in itself.)""
That does seem to be what Adobe is doing to its full product line lately, adding all kinds of DRM. Hmm.
This is just the software business maturing. There are no great expectations for this marriage, its just a strong player with a strong stock using it as currency to remove a competitor.
John Dvorak may be more of a journalist than say Rob Enderle or Laura Didio, but the guy is a nutter. Have a look at his comments on the current iMac: "The design is hardly inspirational. In fact, if you put two headlamps on it and a metal sun visor over its "windshield," it would be reminiscent of a 1954 DeSoto." Or perhaps his opinion that Linux would die as soon as MS released a distro http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1768170,00.as p
I would trust a random guy on slashdot much more than I'd trust Dvorak's insights...
After laughing my way through "John Dvorak Predicts", I have come to understand that, in order to achieve true wisdom, one must learn to ignore everything John Dvorak says.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Why, everyone! Dvorak acts as if they aren't a threat and they shouldn't worry. Very silly: Netscape did the same thing and look at them now!
Microsoft have proven themselves to be a fierce competitor. If they decided to move into image manipulation software, then Adobe would (and should) be frightened. That's because Microsoft doesn't try to compete: it tries to monopolise. That's their whole culture: paranoia that they might become second in the market and thus have their business die. So they act like an 800 pound gorilla and attempt (many times succeeding) to pulverise and totally destroy their competition. And despite the anti-trust trial, they haven't really changed their business tactics.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
MS would never fork GIMP. That would require them embracing open source. While Adobe may be a threat to MS, open source is a far greater threat. By supporting GIMP MS would admit that open source software can be made to the same standard as proprietary software and that their TCO arguments are bullshit.
Not going to happen soon.
Take a look at the latest version of Digital Image by Microsoft...it is rapidly improving and is almost a competitor to the CS edition of Photoshop...almost.
:)
Microsoft has also been trying to keep the "run hungry, everyone else is after you" mentality for a number of years...although I think the beancounters and frustrated managers are starting to take over.
This is a poorly argued point even for Dvorak. Whether or not the buy-out is a good move for Adobe, the idea that they would pay 3.4 bil for a company just to avoid Microsoft is fairly ludicrous. And his assertion that Flash is the program that "powers those annoying web animations" is about as stupid as saying Photoshop is responsible for "those dumb pictures." Personally, I am excited about the prospect of Adobe developing Macromedia's assets. Much of Macromedia's products never hit their targets squarely, neither designers nor developers. The artistic feature set of Flash never radically grew from the state it was in when it was called "FutureSplash" when Macromedia bought it, and as a development platform it underperformed. Adobe certainly has it's fair share of duds in it's portfolio but they have nicely developed their bedrock products, version after version. Some may complain about bloat in Photoshop, but I can say as someone who uses it every day that their feature set is well thought out. And it remains one of the most elegant pieces of software ever assembled. Perhaps Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and After Effects haven't developed as quickly as some would like, but they remain excellent pieces of software. And Adobe has managed to update them smartly. It remains to be seen as to whether they can manage web design and development as well as video and print, but I am excited as to the prospects of making even better dumb web animations.
I read an interesting article about software companies. It stated that you can never underestimate a competitor, even if they are not currently a direct competitor, that can put hundreds of millions of profit into the bank every quarter.
What if Microsoft did try to directly compete with Adobe? They WOULD be successful despite their product's quality, they have a massive market grip on the entire software field.
Microsoft does not make amazing software that does things nobody else can. Microsoft provides a massive sales push for any product they decide to develop, which usually is similar to another existing piece of software.
Look at Office vs Wordperfect, Excel vs Lotus, etc.
So, I disagree with Dvorak. You do need to worry about Microsoft, no matter where you are in the software field, if you are a large (read multi billion dollar) company
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
Dvorak is an intelligent guy, but his forte is not writing intelligent articles and it's not why magazines pay him. He's on the payroll because he makes crazy, outlandish statments that drive up the number of hits on the site. Ten years ago, he couldn't pump out Apple-bashing editorials fast enough, becuase outraged Mac users would read them and then pass around links to fellow Mac users to read his predictions of Apple's demise.
John Dvorak is by far the most sucessful troll in the computing industry, and is a gold mine for advertizer revenue.
Anti-Trust. So Microsoft would get PostScript and PDF, the main defenses against
Microsoft buying Adobe would be a dark day for the Internet.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
You've got to be kidding. Why do you think MS Office does _not_ feature PDF-export like OpenOffice?
It's because MS wants the DOC-format to be standard, _not_ PDF. If PDF becomes the standard for reports, resumes, theses etc. Then MS Office will become less important ==> Less used ==> Less bought.
> close to zero overlap.
You're nowhere near to the truth!
They are competitors.
The browser wars wernt about the browser, they were about the file formats, and Microsoft lost. HTML rules the web, and MS Docs on the web are a sign of corporate incompetance.
But now look. see how many PDFs there are out there. Eventually corporations will start working in PDF directly, rather than farming out the PDFication of data to a specialist department. They will start liscencing Framemaker to all its staff. When that happens, MS Office starts to become duplicated functionality and will ose market share.
So thats why Adobe and MS are in competion, they both want to be the De-facto web publication format.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
'Familiar' and 'intuitive' are not the same thing.